NEW YORK — Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow could have made a testosterone-fueled, shoot’em-up Hollywood version of the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden.

Instead, she joined screenwriter Mark Boal in turning Zero Dark Thirty into a more complex look at the decade-long hunt for the al-Qaida leader — including a frank presentation of U.S. torture and previously undisclosed details of the mission to track the man behind the Sept. 11 attack.

When the film has its opening on Wednesday in limited U.S. release (and on Jan. 11 in central Ohio theaters), Bigelow and Boal want audiences to disregard a year of controversies — including claims, which they have denied, that classified information was leaked to the filmmakers.

“It’s about a look inside the intelligence community,” Bigelow, 61, said in a joint interview with Boal: “the strength and power and courage and dedication and tenacity and vulnerability of these women and men.”

Bigelow won an Academy Award in 2010 for The Hurt Locker, about U.S. Army bomb-disposal experts in Iraq. Her latest movie, she said, puts the audience at the center of the quest to find bin Laden and gives a perspective of the U.S. intelligence community and its changing methods in the years after 9/11.

“It’s a controversial topic; it’s a topic that has been endlessly politicized,” Boal said. “The film has been mis-characterized for a year and a half, and we would love it if people would go and see it and judge for themselves.”

The action thriller has emerged as an Oscar front-runner after picking up multiple early awards and nominations from Hollywood groups.

When bin Laden was killed by Navy commandos in May 2011, Bigelow was only months away from shooting a film about the failed bid to find him in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan during the U.S.-led invasion a decade earlier.

She quickly revised the project.

Zero Dark Thirty opens not long after the Sept. 11 attack with graphic scenes of interrogation — including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and a detainee being forced into a box.

It stars Jessica Chastain as a CIA officer called “Maya” who uses intelligence gleaned from brutal interrogations, electronic surveillance and old-fashioned spying to track down bin Laden through his use of couriers.

The opening scenes of torture, which are seen in the movie as yielding both correct and false information from prisoners, have inflamed debate.Bigelow and Boal said the film isn’t meant to pass judgment — positive or negative — on such interrogation.

“What we are trying to show,” Boal said, “is that it (torture) happened — which I think is not that controversial.

“It’s obviously an ongoing debate,” he added. “It’s a debate within the community of people who are experts, and I am sure that debate will continue for many years.”

Bigelow pointed out that much of the second half of the film shows agents using other methods, such as electronic surveillance.

The film isn’t meant to be an accurate depiction of all the players involved in hunting the al-Qaida leader, Bigelow and Boal said.

Instead, it tells the story through the eyes of Maya, fresh-faced and not long in the field, battling security threats, CIA bureaucracy and unsupportive bosses to eventually track bin Laden to his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

“She is based on a real person, and there are other people who also contributed who are not represented, whose work I hope is reflected in her character,” Boal said. “It’s a character in a movie and not a documentary.”

Chastain told Reuters separately that the woman she portrays remains active. The Washington Post has reported that the agent is in her 30s; remains undercover; and, even as she received the agency’s highest medal, was denied a promotion.

Boal, a freelance journalist turned screenwriter who won a best screenplay Oscar for The Hurt Locker, would say only that the agent is “a real person.”

“I spoke to a number of people,” he said. “I gathered as many firsthand accounts as I could.”